Press S on the keyboard to reveal its Scale property, and adjust it down to 20% (or close to the visual). Now, choose any one of your snapshot images and drag it into the Timeline above the texture image.

This creates and opens a new Composition at the size of your image-ours is 1280 pixels square with a Duration of 10:00 (Composition>Composition Settings). Select your chosen background texture image (ours is called “Paper 1280.psd”) and drag it onto the Create a New Composition icon at the bottom of the Project panel. Note: Though not imperative, ensuring your snapshot images are all the same pixel size will make this project a breeze to complete at the end. For our project, I’m importing three folders of photos of yours truly training in the Italian Alps before a big race in Spain and one paper-texture image I downloaded from iStockphoto to use as a background. In After Effects, double-click in the Project panel to bring up the Import File dialog, then locate and import the images you wish to use. If you’d like to download a finished movie for this tutorial, visit and navigate to the Magazine section. But what if you don’t have those programs or plug-ins, or you want something a little more creative (yet still as easy to replicate and reuse) using a software program you already own? A few tricks and techniques in After Effects will have you up and running in no time at all. Lots of programs and plug-ins create cool photo montages easily and quickly-handy for such things as photo DVDs and slideshows.

After effects add stroke to image